Nature, as shot by citizen scientists

This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired
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"The high-speed camera is the
new microscope but it's just for the rich," says David Lentink, 36,
an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford
University. "So we began lending this incredibly expensive camera
to ordinary people."

Lentink (then assistant professor of experimental zoology at
Wageningen University) and his team had a pot of money from winning
an academic prize. The university matched the amount, enabling
Lentink to spend €200,000 (£170,000) on 30 Casio EX-F1
HD video cameras -- capable of shooting up to 1,200 frames per
second -- and one €140,000 (£117,000) Phantom camera (7,500fps in HD). The equipment was for Flight
Artists, a programme to capture natural flight that is open to
anyone who wants to participate.

The aim is to expand Lentink's previous study of bird and insect
biomechanics that had led him, with his aerospace-engineering
background, to develop the free-flight ornithopter, the DelFly, and
the morphing-wing micro-aerial vehicle, RoboSwift. The result is over
1,400 films so far, shot by over 400 members of the public,
documenting everything from the behavioural acrobatics of fruit
flies to the baffling sight of geese flying upside down.
"Initially, I was hoping for one good movie from each participant
after a day's training and two days with the camera. But we got
many, many more."

The team is currently
uploading selected films to a dedicated YouTube
channel, all of which are available free to use for
non-commercial research and as teaching tools. "We benefit from
having so many people shooting for us -- everyone had different
ideas of what would be interesting, so we were bound to find cool
things. If we'd just lent these cameras to a scientist it would
have been amazingly boring." And is there anything left on his
wish-list? "I want a high-speed movie of mating swifts: two seconds
mid-air and it's over. It's incredible."